Saint Colby and the Fifth Column

by J. Orlin Grabbe

When I first heard of William Colby's capsized
canoe and disappearance near his place on the Wicomico
River, I thought, "Well, maybe he won't be ragging on Jim
Norman and me anymore." It was of course absurd that
Norman and I had ever registered on Colby's radar screen
in the first place. We were small fry: Norman was an
unemployed journalist recently fired from Forbes
Magazine, while I was rumored to be an ex-academic
suffering a bad case of sunstroke.

Norman and I had met through the dead mediation
of Deputy White House Counsel Vince Foster. In my
peregrinations as a banking consultant, I had come across
the fact of the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA)
spying on domestic banking transactions, had thought this
a bit too Big Brotherly for my tastes, and had written an
essay entitled The End of Ordinary
Money about the uses
of the monetary system for surveillance. Jim Norman, a
Senior editor at Forbes, had written about the same NSA
covert project, pointing out that Vince Foster was one of
its overseers on behalf of a Little Rock software firm.
Norman's research pointed to another explosive issue,
namely that at the time of Foster's death both Foster and
Hillary Clinton were under counterintelligence
investigation for selling U.S. secrets to the Israelis.

When Norman and I met in Reno, Nevada, I
learned about one of his sources--the point man of a group
called the Fifth Column. This person,
Chuck Hayes, had a
nice computer and could do some neat tricks with it--
things in some specific areas in which I was looking to
educate myself. Hayes, meanwhile, had heard about my
essay The End of Ordinary Money, which I had published
on the Internet. Hayes, ex-CIA, got a copy from the CIA
library, and liked it. Hayes and I hit it off right away,
discovering an overlap of mutual interests.

For several years the Fifth Column had searched
computer data bases, including foreign bank accounts,
looking for evidence of political bribery, kickbacks, and
related subversion of the U.S. Constitution and political
process. They had uncovered the financial information
concerning the Foster/Clinton espionage. They had also
transferred millions of dollars from politically-related
illegal accounts at off-shore banks in the Cayman Islands,
Switzerland, and elsewhere to a holding account at the
U.S. Federal Reserve.

Jim Norman wrote an article Fostergate for Forbes
magazine about all this, an article which was cleared by
the magazine's fact-checkers and lawyers, but at the last
minute killed by Steve Forbes, through the urging of
Caspar Weinberger, former Defense Secretary and
Chairman of the Board of Forbes, Inc. I promised Norman
that I would publicize his article through the Internet, and
began a series on Vince Foster. The series also allowed
me to raise the issues I had discussed in The End of
Ordinary Money in a different way. The series generated
a large Internet audience, including not only sympathizers
to the cause of uncovering the cover-up, but also small
coteries of others with counteragendas--including White
House disinformation specialists, NSA email and usegroup
monitors, and a myriad of others bent on establishing
territorial rights to pieces of the story.

One example of the latter was Daniel Brandt, a
researcher who made his living off the CIA by selling a
database of undigested articles mostly critical of it. Brandt
had identified "information warfare" as a new ploy to
justify old intelligence budgets, and hence reports of the
Fifth Column by Norman and me had to be part of this
campaign. After all, Norman referred to Fifth Column
members as "CIA hackers", and they were reported to be
up to something good, so the story must be propaganda
since everyone knew that organization never did anything
worthwhile. Brandt then identified the ultimate source of
all this "Fifth Column" disinformation as probably the
"well-connected" Jack Wheeler, "a right-wing adventurer"
and contributor to Strategic Investment (SI), whom I
apparently gullibly believed. Neither my friend Wheeler
nor I could think of any good reason why I would be
getting information about computers or banking from
Wheeler, but this theory apparently made sense to Brandt.
(For the record, Wheeler is not "right-wing", whatever that
is supposed to mean. He is philosophically a libertarian,
although he was once head of Youth for Reagan, a
conservative organization. Wheeler had come to admire
Reagan when he heard a speech in which Reagan said,
"There is no Left or Right. There is only Up or Down: Up
toward liberty or Down toward tyranny." As far as
connections, I assume Wheeler has a few, stemming from
the time his grandfather was chief bodyguard to four
successive U.S. Presidents--from Teddy Roosevelt to
Warren Harding.)

But over at SI, Brandt's view was supported by
William Colby, among others. I don't profess to know how
much Colby was actually consulted with respect to SI
editorial policy, but Colby was known to support the view
that "Foster was killed but he wasn't a spy." (In Colby's
own case, this view would be simply inverted: "Colby
was a spy, but he wasn't killed.") Moreover, there was no
Fifth Column and no high-level source would admit to
having ever heard of this Chuck Hayes--hence Hayes was
just another liar and huckster with a hidden agenda of his
own. Colby, of course, knew very well who Hayes was,
but had reasons to pretend otherwise. The most obvious
one may relate to the circumstances by which Colby was
removed as CIA director in 1977, an action in which
Hayes was involved. But the more probable reason had to
do with political turf, for it would become abundantly
clear Colby was not in sympathy with the activities of the
Fifth Column, as Colby himself had a little piece of the U.
S. political process for sale.

SI relentless pursued the notion that the death of
Vince Foster was not a suicide. It specialized in
highlighting the ease by which the gaping holes in the
official story could be exposed. But ultimately it could
provide its readers no explanation for the continuance of
the cover-up, because it initially rejected the true
explanation: namely that at the time of his death Vince
Foster was under counterintelligence investigation for
selling U.S. secrets to Israel. Thus SI was not in a position
to explain to its readers why the Whitewater Committee
under Alfonse D'Amato would supposedly accept the
Foster suicide verdict at face value. The simple
explanation was that doing so allowed D'Amato to take on
Bill Clinton through the Whitewater investigation without
at the same time having to antagonize his constituents by
pursuing a line of inquiry destined to expose a can of
worms relating to Israel.

Yes, the Foster murder cover-up was an easy sham
to see through. But no one wanted to bear the burden of
doing so officially.

There were other people, naturally, who had
different reasons for going along with this scenario of
events, unrelated to issues of national security. British
journalist Ambrose Evans-Pritchard would dump on the
story by ludicrously claiming that a Swiss account number
found on a paper from the trunk of Barry Seal's car (an
account that turned out to have Caspar Weinberger's name
attached to it) was really an aircraft number--thus
providing one more reason not to believe those Jim
Norman articles about plundered Swiss accounts. But then
Evans-Pritchard had carried the information around for
some time, in blissful ignorance of what he had. After all,
the record from Seal was a series of letters--so how it
could be a Swiss "numbered" account?

Meanwhile, William Colby told Washington
journalist Sarah McClendon and others that Colin Powell
would be the Republican nominee for President. But
Colby wasn't able to subsequently explain Powell's failure
to stand for office. After all, since the Fifth Column was a
mythical entity, and the tales of political retirements
inspired by financial disclosure was disinformation, then
naturally the packets of financial information that were in
fact delivered to Powell could have no bearing on Powell's
political decisions. (The packets were said to have
detailed millions of dollars of undeclared jewelry received
from Kuwait, a stash of gold bars representing payoffs
from military deals, and involvement in an arms network
that does not hesitate to deal in proscribed products such
as plutonium or to plunder U.S. military bases for goods in
hot demand on the world market.)

But after Colby's death, how quickly he became
Saint Colby. Rumors ran amuck. Since his death followed
shortly on the heels of Commerce Secretary Ron Brown's,
surely a common hand was involved in both. Since Colby
was the man who had revealed the CIA's family jewels in
the 1977 congressional probe into intelligence activities,
surely he was now dead for whistle-blowing of the same
noble sort. Since Colby was an SI editor, and SI was a
publication that relentlessly investigated the Vince Foster
murder, surely Colby was a martyr to the cause of truth.
Publications that had not heretofore acknowledged the
existence of the Fifth Column now breathlessly reported
that it "cannot be ruled out" that Colby was the head of it.
The rush to deification was all quite nauseating.

Yes, there was definitely a Ron Brown connection,
for at the time of Brown's death Colby was working with
Brown in representing the interests of Vietnam to the U.S.
This hardly shores up the argument for sainthood. Even
those convinced a change in U.S. policy toward Vietnam is
mandatory might wonder about the propriety of an ex-head
of U.S. intelligence representing the interests of a foreign
power. This is reinforced by the Brown association, since
Brown himself reportedly asked Vietnam to deposit
$700,000 in a bank account for his personal use as the
quid pro quo for considering their requests for
reconciliation.

Colby had made his reputation as head of the
Vietnam-War era Phoenix project which had used
computer data bases to track political "enemies" in
Vietnam, many of whom were then targeted for
assassination. The ruthlessness he showed there was not
all that different from the ruthlessness he later showed
toward ex-colleagues when it came time to cover his ass
before congressional investigators. Colby's whistle-
blowing was dictated by necessity, not choice.

Colby may have simply fallen out of his canoe and
drowned. But if he was given a little nudge, one suspects
he was out of line with respect to his foreign
entanglements. And one seriously doubts the hands
involved were the same as those involved in the death of
Ron Brown. Ron Brown was after all (as I reported in
Ron Brown's Loose Lips Seal His Fate)
a threat to his
business colleagues, and he met his fate as a result of a
bomb triggered by a descending detonator aboard his
plane. Information about the bomb on Brown's plane has
already been released to British papers by MI6.
Meanwhile, the damage control minions in the U.S. are
desperately trying to see that the true story doesn't bleed
back here overseas. Fat chance.

Unlike the Fifth Column, which has used
information to expose political corruption, Colby was
seemingly indifferent to the corrupt uses of information
itself. In any event he wasn't around when the Fifth
Column delivered a packet of information to Senator Bob
Dole on Monday, May 13. On Wednesday, Dole then
dramatically announced his resignation from the Senate to
run full-time for President on a non-existent campaign
budget, in the apparent presumption of a receiving a
Republican nomination that will not come his way.

But don't be surprised if equally dramatic and
convoluted decisions are announced by the Clintons in the
near future.